So on day 3 after visiting Crazy Horse, we headed to our campground and made dinner and set up our tents. It was raining on and off and pretty cold, but we had some tasty chili and Jackson somehow managed to build a fire, despite the wet conditions. The next morning it was pretty cold when I woke up, as I was getting out of the shower, Felicia was entering the bath house, shivering, and complaining about walking from her tent in the snow. Assuming she was over-exaggerating, I laughed, until I stepped out the door and saw this:
That white stuff on the ground and on our tents? Snow. And it only got worse as the day progressed!! Nevertheless, after packing our stuff up, we headed to Mount Rushmore to try to catch a glimpse of the presidents' faces, despite the fog, snow, and cold. We took the Needles scenic by-way that goes through the Black Hills area, and it was beautiful! A few things about the Black Hills: the Black Hills were formed during the uplift of the Rocky Mountains - they are actually billion-year-old metamorphic rocks that have been brought to the surface and broken through the overlying, younger, sedimentary rock units. The main granite in the Black Hills is the Harney Peak granite, which is what Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse are carved in. The granite is very old, about 1.7 billion years old, but is younger than the metamorphic rocks of the Black Hills that it intrudes. The granite was brought to the surface as the Black Hills were being formed, about 50 million years ago. The "Needles" that are referred to in the area are the granite peaks that are resistant to weathering and stick up like needles from the rest of the landscape. Interestingly, the Turks give granite peaks the same name! "Sivri" means "needles" in Turkish and the town of "Sivrihisar" was named for the surrounding granite peaks in the mountains. The granite, at least from a distance, is very white, which seems to be in conflict with the "Black Hills." The Black Hills got their name from the dark dark green pine trees that are so abundant in the area and make the hills appear almost black from a distance. Unfortunately, the pine population in the area is suffering due to the recent arrival of a pine beetle of some sort. The trees that are still there though looked beautiful in the snow! This is a picture of what the Needles by-way looked like as we were driving back from Mount Rushmore. The "blackness" of the hills is very apparent here against the white snow!
Here is a picture of Mount Rushmore taken from just outside the Visitors' Center door. I think I was one of the few people to get a shot of it! The fog was very thick and after hanging out by the door for a while, I managed to snap this during a tiny break in the fog. Good things come to those who wait :)
After braving the cold and snow to get a glimpse of Mount Rushmore, we took in some local culture at the "Sugar Shack" - home of the best burgers in the Black Hills! Megan and I were sitting at the counter though where we had a good view of the food prep station - the burgers were frozen. Oh well! Everyone enjoyed their lunch and the toasty diner nonetheless! They had a really high-tech fire alarm there, I felt like I had to get a picture. Maybe these devices will eventually make it to the rest of the country:
Thanks for the tasty grilled cheese, Bubba! I'll definitely be back :)
While the lunch at the Sugar Shack was good, this was also the place where mutiny and dissent began to grow. The majority of the trip participants, despite our warnings about average temperatures and weather conditions in the areas we would be traveling to, did not bring cold weather clothes or snow gear. In addition, we learned from the park rangers at Mount Rushmore that a huge snow storm was sitting over Yellowstone and was effectively not moving. Many of the roads into Yellowstone were closed due to the storm. Thus the idea of going south was born. However, we continued on our intended path that afternoon - ending the day at Devil's Tower National Monument in Wyoming.
There are several theories for how Devil's Tower was formed, however, all geologists recognize that it is an igneous intrusion of some variety that has undergone some degree of erosion, creating the tower shape seen today. It is made of a rock called "phonolite" which gets its name from the ringing sound the rock makes when struck with a metal object. It was not snowing at Devil's Tower, so we were able to do the ~1 mile hike around the base of the tower. This is me at the start of the trail.
You can see that the tower looks like a handful of pencils or rods of some sort. These are called columns. When magma cools underground, but in the shallow subsurface, it forms columns. These formations are often called "columnar basalts" and can be found around the world. A well known example is the Giant's Causeway in Ireland. The columns break over time due to physical weathering processes, littering the ground around the base with broken pieces of columns of various sizes and leaving the remnants stuck onto the tower.
From Devil's Tower we found our campsite but due to the inclement weather the night before, we opted to rent a few cabins the campground offered over using our tents. That night Megan and Kevin and I looked up weather reports and maps and made the decision to abandon the northern route and adopt a southern route instead. Our mutinous crew was very excited by the change of events and many students partook in revelry that lasted very late into the night.
Seminar time! More later on how our adventure progressed into uncharted territory!
Happy trails!
Sarah
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